The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (The MoUS) is a temporary fictional museum at TENT that redistributes the hierarchies between artwork and the objects that make their presentation possible. The group exhibition lends its framework from the prologue to the eponymous novel by Dubravka Ugrešić from 1998. The text puts forward a situation in which a number of objects come together coincidentally due to the healthy appetite of a walrus in the Berlin zoo. In the book, the objects function as both actors and props: they make the story possible, but simultaneously remain silently present in the background.

With this prologue as a point of departure, The MoUS exhibits a diverse range of artistic practices concerning the material and written language of an exhibition within an institutional context. Temporary walls, press releases, plants, work descriptions, plinths, projectors and sockets move to the foreground; guiding objects that inform the vocabulary of an exhibition, yet tend to be withheld from sight and thought to the audience, as “support structures” and “carriers” of a work. Ultimately, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender aims to open a space in which we can face the object on an equal footing, making the persistent relationships between objects en subjects ambiguous, towards an idea of objects as partners in our daily working and living practices.The MoUS consists of a group exhibition, lectures, a museum night and publication, in which the experience of the exhibited objects to the audience is put to the test. Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk is TENT’s 2015 Curatorial Fellow.